What’s the Future of PHP?
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The early 2000’s marked the start of the “Web 2.0”, transforming the internet, thanks to scripting languages such as PHP. As one of the earliest and widely used scripting languages, PHP helped transform the web that we know of today. Years have passed, languages adapt, but has PHP changed enough to stay in the limelight?
The Bright Side
According to a survey by W3Techs held in June 2015, PHP is the primary server side language used by 82 percent of websites. Even Facebook and Twitter make use of PHP. One of the most popular CMS, WordPress, is built entirely on PHP and sites using WordPress makes up nearly 27 percent of the internet.
As PHP is Open Source, anyone can contribute to PHP and build their frameworks around which maintains a constant level of development.
Facebook created “Hack”, a programming language that can interoperate with PHP and run on HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM). There are multitudes of PHP frameworks in use these days, Codeigniter, Zend, Laravel to name a few – creating faster development and easier code maintenance.
Since its introduction, PHP has had many versions – we’re currently on 7. It has improved significantly over time to keep pace with the introduction of other web development technologies such as ASP.NET. Many programmers still use PHP because it’s easier to learn and it’s much cheaper to deploy PHP websites compared to other language based websites because it can work on any server, Linux or Windows based.
The release of PHP 7, it also now supported on 64-bit operating systems allowing better performance and support for 64-bit large files and integers.
The Dark Side
PHP has significantly improved on the performance front but it has to compete with the likes of Node.js and Python which are pretty efficient for computation. It is still missing JIT compilation, and lack of asynchronous and multitasking support at its core makes things more difficult in the ever-evolving world of Web 2.0.
PHPNG is a branch that is experimented on for better memory optimisation of PHP which gives a silver lining in this cloud of darkness.
Open Source also has its caveats, take fragmentation – PHP being has a lot of frameworks, which can be a bit of a barrier to entry for new programmers.
Security is another flag for PHP, and it’s an area that needs some work. About 30 percent of all vulnerabilities are linked to PHP, and this might be again due to the fragmented nature of the language.
The file inclusion vulnerability is the most frequently used exploitation technique according to the analysis done on Zone-H, the archive of defaced websites. The insecure usage of various PHP functions such as include, allow_url_fopen and require has led to security flaws in websites using PHP as their server side language.
